What’s the Deal with Flex and Paint, Anyway?

It’s a rainy day in Phoenix. I stepped outside and into my 4Runner so I could have my rainy day cafe vibe. I woke up a bit late today, and that’s OK— I’m trying to embrace some slowness despite my internal drive to make things happen right away.

I was good about waking up with a clear head and getting straight to work over the past week. That has fallen by the wayside today— distractions crept in. I have an issue with my tax license and I need to send some emails. Neither are so important as to override my making hours, but they did anyway; I’m still trying to prioritize my most meaningful outputs for the first hours of the day. Usually this is painting, but lately it has been about content and planning for my courses.

I’m at the cafe, trying to articulate my “message” about Flex and Paint. I’ll be putting all of this content together in a video course which I hope to share with everyone.

Writing by hand at the cafe is, coincidentally,

a practice of body awareness.

For those of you who don’t know, I run a TikTok account called @flexnpaint. It’s a bit goofy, and a bit of a stretch in order to leverage my physique to further two arms of my business: my personal training, and my art. Regularly I’m on a livestream, painting shirtless. Most people stop in and are inherently confused, but after hearing my discussions on the practice, I think people begin to understand the point.

I see the value in the practice, but I don’t think it is immediately obvious to the people who might need it in their life. At the surface, it’s about two individual practices in which you need to put in practice over long periods of time, accumulating reps towards a future goal.

I started branding as “flex and paint” because of my experiences in San Francisco in which I would paint with the window open and need a way to warm my body due to the chilly fog. I quickly realized in painting in this manner, I had an acute increase in my body awareness which I would leverage to enhance my paintings. I was able to stay in a state in which I had no thoughts; rather than ruminating or thinking about a painting, I would lift weights while staring at my in-progress piece, and my subconscious would respond with that increase in physical momentum with an increase in artistic momentum. I found that the intersection of creation and fitness improved my ability to remain in an unthinking state, purely leaning into art as a practice of inhabiting my body.

This is the crux of the value and the lesson I received from this state of creation. Body awareness has brought so much to my life; I lean on it while inside the gym, I use it to understand and regulate my daily emotions, and I can readily “interact with my gut” as an expression of artistic taste. How does a piece make me feel? Does my body “think” that a piece of art is moving in the right direction, either as I’m painting or after I’ve finished?

Inside and outside of the studio, I reaped the benefits of this practice. Recently I had someone ask me how to get over their fear of “painting something wrong.” My response was that when creating from a place of inhabiting your body, you can put objectivity on the sidelines— you can’t be “doing it wrong” if you’re connecting with your body and moving through the physical pathway. Only our brains will tell us that we’re not enough or that we’re doing it wrong.

Not only is the practice of “flex and paint” one in which you’re trusting your gut and becoming more perceptual, but it contains many helpful messages. I consider both painting and lifting to be repetition-based exercises in which you need to understand that you won’t have immediate growth. Only due to long-term accumulation of these reps will one improve. I think that people can get value out of this delayed gratification; we can’t expect to be shredded by summer or paint the Mona Lisa via one pushup or one brushstroke. Still, you learn to enjoy the journey when you’re focused on body awareness—I don’t think about the outcome in either and I only consider how I’m feeling while I’m doing it.

There are many other messages which I hope to share through this practice. Initially I began painting because I wanted an activity which was creation-focused rather than consumption-based, and I’d love to tie that into this message in a more intentional way. I’ve also learned more about the nuance of my body, my routines, and my paintings due to this perception-based and sensory approach, and I don’t know how to articulate that yet.

I get the sense that many people live like I used to live; it’s hard to stay in the practice of meditation and mindfulness. I had periods of my life in which I was disconnected from my body, and disconnected from stillness and negative-space. (More on “ceiling-time" later.) Yet I think that both painting and exercise are meditations. It’s hard to garner up the motivation to do certain activities until you pay deliberate attention to how you feel while you’re doing them. I think even people who are creating and exercising might be “going through the motions,” and I’ve attributed this practice to my connection with how I actually feel when I’m creating or lifting weights. This enables us to have positive shifts in our mindset and positive directional changes with what we want to make from our limited time. I think that in choosing “flex and paint,” I’ve been able to make it easy on myself—rather than forcing myself into meditation when I just don’t feel like it, I’ve been lucky to find something that gives similar benefits but leverages the combination of mindfulness and visible long-term results. I hope that people can receive the messages and identify for themselves what specific activities they choose which may offer similar benefits, but the key is paying attention.

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear from you about this piece—does this practice make sense to you? Do you have a practice which incorporates body awareness with long-term results (outside of the benefits of body awareness)? If not, what can help you get started?

-Kevin